This is how #tuesdaytreats help us to connect and be more creative

Posted: 17/10/2019

Every Tuesday from 12 AM till 1 PM, we’re having #tuesdaytreats at the Chase office. The concept? One of our colleagues shares knowledge with the rest of the team. This is usually followed by Q&A and setting up a task for the entire team to follow up. The relaxed brainstorming sessions are powered by healthy snacks to boost energy and help us focus. The idea for Tuesday Treats came half a year ago and since then, the entire Chase team dedicates this time to connect with colleagues and learn something new and relevant to social media and storytelling.

This idea was brought to the table by our CEO Sven De Coninck and COO Jan D’hont, who presented the idea during a team meeting. The reason we started #tuesdaytreats is threefold. First, it started out of ‘lack of time’, as it was often difficult to bring everyone together to do a creative brainstorm. Also, we offer a lot of interesting classes by international guest speakers in our postgraduate courses, which are accessible to students, but not to colleagues. Last but not least, everyone in the team knows interesting facts or picks up a new trend which we share in our #todayilearned Slack channel. However, sometimes that info gets lost in the many Slack threads so #tuesdaytreats is a perfect way to share valuable insights with the entire team.

Talent coaches Sacha Claes and Pieter Blomme are in charge of organizing the #tuesdaytreats, and the entire team is encouraged to come up with their suggestions for a topic. You can either choose to showcase material that you already know a lot about or you can pick a certain topic that you’re interested in. The sessions start with a talk and a half an hour presentation which leaves us with another half an hour for the interactive part. The different categories of these inspirational sessions are #pickyourbrain, #shareknowledge, #fun, and #cocreation.

Half an hour to listen to your colleagues with an open mind

According to talent coach Pieter Blomme, #tuesdaytreats help the team to create a moment to escape from daily tasks and listen with an open mind to your colleagues. You can get inspiration from things that are outside your own field of expertise and activate fresh ideas you can then apply in your own field. Overall, this weekly get together challenges everyone to learn new things. It also helps to make everyone in the team feel equal to each other since everyone gets time to focus on the topic they want to focus on.

“I think colleagues sharing expertise makes for a healthy company. We often do it online and with our customers, why not with our own colleagues?”

However, we can still improve on how we prepare the sessions. If you take away one hour in the schedule of 10 colleagues, it better be useful. We could still adapt the content a bit more to the needs of our colleagues. “What do they need to execute their job in a better way? Only then it will become a real treat.”

Always be learning

On the line-up of the previous #tuesdaytreats editions: Facebook groups, brand storytelling, a baseline for the Chase Music festival summer, checking out the projects of our Digital Storytelling postgraduates at KASK, using storytelling layers in podcasts, personal branding on Linkedin, getting feedback from the team on project pitches,…

When we asked Pieter Blomme if he saw a difference in the team since the start of #tuesdaytreats, he said: “I think it gets people out of their comfort zone and lets people try different things”. For example that one time we made a TikTok movie with the team. Or that time when we talked about podcasts to the colleagues who aren’t involved in the podcast creation.

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